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I believe that Google are in the process of the biggest corporate fuckup of recent times (ok ok, not counting Intel who might match them, but I don't even pretend to understand what's happening there). No "they're ruining the internet" here, this is me trying to think in purely corporate terms
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In short: every big corp has to constantly play whatever is the current hype cycle in order to keep the money rolling from investors. It's irrelevant whether their management actually believe the tech du jour is important or not, this is just the game that they have to play to stay ahead. I think that Google's fundamental mistake is that they have compromised their core product in service of the LLM hype cycle. Yes, the "product" is really Adwords, but the search service is what actually drives it. Yes, they have other products like Android, Youtube, Gmail and Chrome, but search is the biggest of them all
Compare this to Facebook. The whole metaverse thing is probably one of the biggest wastes of money in the entire history of business, but the whole thing came and went without it ever touching their core products: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. So they write off the loss, pick themselves up and jump onto the next hype cycle (LLMs) much poorer but still fundamentally healthy as a business
Add to this that generative transformers were literally invented at Google, and they completely failed to see the potential and they've been just another imitator for the entire hype cycle. The big hype battle right now is between GPT and Claude, nobody gives a shit about Gemini, I guess including investors
I have an additional thing which is even more speculative. The thing that Google's research division is most iconically known for is deep RL. And personally, I believe we're not even close to seeing the last of what deep RL can do. My conspiracy theory is that the top level of Google management basically shut down the AlphaStar project because they didn't want to enter the industries that it would be most useful for, like finance and military tech. I think that history will judge that Google in 2017 were sitting on the 2 most profitable technologies of the decade, and failed to exploit either of them
I definitely don't expect Google to completely blow up, just to diminish and become a zombie husk of their former selves, like many equally giant tech companies have been doing since IBM. Of all the big tech companies right now, Google are the only one I actually expect this to happen to any time soon
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Addendum: The alternative, if Google are not going down without a fight, is that they could start trying to end the LLM hype cycle (which they know they lost) and try to trigger a new one in which they have a head start on their main rivals
@julesh it is striking to me that Google was easily at its most innovative when it had “20% time”, “authors at Google”, “flat management structure”, “Google summer of code” etc. etc. and whilst I am sure that created many seeming problems with how they have developed (perceived disorganization), they are left with the remnants of something wildly innovative dying to a new culture of growth-at-all-costs management which is positively contemptuous of all that built the company. A tech company that so disrespects its programmers/researchers will not remain innovative for long - who would want to work in such a place when your talents will be actually appreciated elsewhere?
@julesh In much the same way people worry about what countries with nukes will do when the government collapses, this concerns me with respect to Google’s position in the ad ecosystem.
Not that it would bother me if the whole thing autoimmolated and we got something less centralized, but it’s more likely they’ll get (even) less selective who they take money from on the way down, and give malvertisers and scammers free rein if it lets them make quarterlies.
@julesh To be fair, Google has been in the quantum computing hype cycle for ages now—given what happened last year with the IBM kicked eagle experiment, I give it around three months before a paper shows that you can do whatever Google's quantum computer did better and faster using tensor networks.
It's pretty strange to me that the Google paper about their new quantum processor—which you can read here (<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y>, and you can read the manuscript here <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-makes-a-major-quantum-computing-breakthrough/>)—is from an unedited manuscript. Moreover, while most of the paper's authors don't have a personal financial stake in the results being true, the Google Quantum AI company has a *huge* vested interest in this.
While it would definitely be quite cool if this result was true, I'll wait to see if it gets reproduced before drawing any conclusions.
@julesh I live in that intersection where I read "RL" and my brain yells "Rocket League" but the other part of my brain yells "reinforcement learning" and both sides of my brain have a chuckle at which of the two has been the more commercially successful product over the last 5 years...
@julesh
There could be another explanation/hypothesis for this.
They (the researchers) were aware that the technology was pure hype. Therefore there was no "need" (or sense in) creating products based on it. When other companies showed that that was money to be made, business people took over and forced it into products.
My feeling is that AI (or at least LLMS) is a FOMO or me-too market. The gain is marginal but not participating is feared as fatal
@julesh 
Mark my words, Julesh: GenAI, LLMs et al., will turn out to be a bigger hyped-up waste of resources than Mr Zuckerberg's folly -- the Metaverse -- could ever have hoped to be.